One OSHA Inspector for Every 6,000-Plus Workplaces: New Report Details the Enforcement Gap Behind America's Workplace Violence Crisis

Even as workplace violence accounted for 77,780 serious injuries and 470 deaths between 2023 and 2024, the federal regulatory system responsible for preventing it remains, by most measures, severely under-resourced, according to a new report from DeMayo Law Offices on occupational safety in the United States. There is currently no OSHA standard specifically mandating workplace violence prevention in any industry nationwide; instead, employers are governed only by the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s General Duty Clause, a 54-year-old provision that broadly requires workplaces be free of recognized hazards but imposes no specific training, planning, or risk assessment requirements.

The enforcement numbers underscore the gap. As of 2023, just 1,875 federal and state OSHA inspectors were tasked with overseeing approximately 11.5 million American workplaces, a ratio that translates to each workplace being inspected, on average, once every 186 years, supported by an enforcement budget of roughly $3.93 per worker. Even where violations are identified, maximum penalties are capped at $16,131 per serious violation and $161,323 for repeat offenses, figures the report notes often fall well short of the actual financial, physical, and emotional cost of a serious workplace assault.

The industries left most exposed by this enforcement gap are also the ones facing the highest violence rates. Healthcare and social assistance recorded 55,980 serious violent assaults during the study period, a rate of 17.1 per 10,000 full-time equivalent workers, nearly 5.5 times the private industry average, and still operates without a binding federal prevention standard after a proposed healthcare-specific OSHA rule was reclassified and shelved. Educational services, retail trade, and leisure and hospitality followed with 5,530, 4,660, and 2,850 serious violence cases respectively; each industry left to rely on the same broad, non-specific General Duty Clause as low-risk office environments.

California remains the notable exception. Senate Bill 553, effective July 1, 2024, made the state the first to require most general industry employers to maintain written Workplace Violence Prevention Plans, log incidents, and provide employee training. No equivalent requirement exists federally, or in the vast majority of other states, leaving tens of millions of workers in healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, and food service without a legal mandate protecting them from workplace violence.

The report links this regulatory vacuum directly to rising burnout across the country’s highest-risk industries. In healthcare and social assistance, the sector with the highest workplace violence rate in the country, 81% of workers reported burnout and 60% reported depression, with nearly two in five saying they had considered leaving their jobs specifically because of violence exposure. In educational services, 60% of K-12 educators reported burnout, with 20% missing work in 2023 as a result and 7% resigning entirely during the 2023-2024 school year.

The pattern extends into hospitality and retail as well. In leisure and hospitality, 47% of managers reported burnout in 2024, and 64% of staff who left their jobs cited customer volatility as a factor. In retail trade, 35% of workers said they felt unsafe at work, up from 27% the year prior, with one in four saying they had considered leaving their position over personal safety concerns. Across affected industries, the report estimates absenteeism rises by approximately 20% among workers in high-risk roles, turnover increases by 15% in workplaces with frequent violent incidents, and companies lose roughly 10% of workforce productivity in the aftermath of a serious workplace attack.

Combining violence rates, wage data, and burnout figures into a single comparative score, the report’s authors found healthcare and social assistance to be the only industry landing in the “Critical” risk tier, with a composite score of 9.5 out of 10. Educational services, retail trade, leisure and hospitality, and professional and business services all fell into a “High” risk tier, underscoring that the enforcement gap described in the report affects a broad swath of the American workforce, not a single isolated industry.

“Behind every workplace violence case is a real person: a nursing assistant struck by a patient, a retail worker threatened by an irate customer, a teacher corralling a volatile classroom,” said a spokesperson for DeMayo Law Offices. “These workers are asking for no more than to go to work and come home safely, and without real enforcement behind the rules on the books, that’s simply not guaranteed.”

The report concludes that without a dedicated federal standard, meaningfully increased enforcement capacity, or penalties that reflect the true cost of workplace violence, the industries already bearing the heaviest burden are likely to see burnout, turnover, and injury rates continue to climb.